Alfred,
First, I sense you pondering some sort of inconsistency between Leontev
and Vygotsky / Luria. I could go out on a limb and entertain one,
Leon'tev seemed much more suspicious of a category called "soul". Or
more specifically the whole notion of consciousness that Vygotsky
emphasised, Leontev kind of glossed over.
The quote which I took from Lucien Seve signifies a committment to the
significance of studying the concrete individual. The soul or individual
is not simply a fabrication, or taken as simply a reflection of social
relations, but one had to leave the head so to speak in order to truely
understand it. I think of the Luria genre of biography as in shattered
mind and dude that lost his memory where Luria paints a rich descriptive
picture that far exceeds the brain.
However, I don't think there would be a great wall between the three.
Interestingly; you refer to Luria and Vygotsky as cultural-historical
(was not Leontev there too) and compare them to Leontev.
N
Alfred Lang wrote:
> Many thanks, Mohamed and Nate, for the details of the Luria quote and
> its spread and fate. It is certainly in the spirit of the early
> cultural-historical thinking, whether formulated by Luria or Vygotsky.
> I wonder how well it would also fit Leontiev's way of understanding
> activity. Anybody willing to help me?
>
> To Mike and Jay: a sentence similar to: "you have to loose (give up,
> abandon, forget etc.) your soul (mind, will, psyche. goals, God etc.)
> when you want to find (gain, expand, elevate etc.) it" is rather
> standard in most branches of Christian mysticism as well as in many
> Buddhist, Taoist and related meditative and practical movements.
>
> Naturally, there are scores of interpretations extant over the
> centuries and I would be the last to consider myself an expert in this
> field. On a basic level the idea is as trivial as it is mighty: once
> you have a prefabricated picture of what you search you shall rarely
> find it in cases where it is not a ready-made. Or, prejudice prevents
> you from seeing real things.
>
> But in the context given, to me, the phrase simply means something
> like: give up looking for what holds humans together, both as an
> individual or as a group, within humans. You better look into the
> whole situation of a human being, including environment, ingoing and
> outgoing streams included; and changes as well as fixations.
>
> Jay has eloquently elaborated on this. But why, Ricardo, would you not
> as well renounce a materialistic approach to consciousness? Over the
> years, I have lost most desire to get into clear fields of
> understanding by reconstructing the history of word use. A very
> instructive lesson to get for anybody reading German is the
> Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie in 12 volumes, roughly 70cm of
> bookshelf. A well weighted dose of history of terminology can easily
> eat the rest of your faith that humans can better understand each
> other by means of their language. In spite of your knowing that there
> is not choice.
>
> And so my ramblings on CHAT climax with Philipp Cappers observation of
>
>> ISCRAT as a Tower of Babel. I noted dialogue after dialogue that
>> seemed to me to actually be semi-confrontational discussions (I
>> change from
>> 'dialogue' to 'discussion' deliberately) about terminology.
>> When I shared my observations with others I found that I was far from
>> alone
>> in perceiving this.
>
>
> I have this impression now some 40 and odd years as concerns the
> so-called science of psychology, mainstream. Not to mention philosophy
> which in so many respect is at the origin of the conceptual troubles
> in the modern sciences. In what respect can and does CHAT evade
> similar fate?
>
> We are definitely in need of a thorough conceptual reconstruction of
> our understanding the human condition.
>
> Alfred
-- There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it. A.R. Luriavygotsky@charter.net http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/vygotsky/index.html http://marxists.org/subject/psychology/index.htm
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